In the previous post, I already said that we enjoyed Death Valley a lot. We stayed overnight in Beatty, just outside the park boundary, and when we got the park ticket, they said it was valid for three days. We were not meant to be in Las Vegas until in…
A lot of crystal ball gazing for this year made by various people has included the prediction that mailing lists will stop working. Everyone is complaining that people are getting too much email and the author mailing list will stop being so effective because readers have subscribed to too many…
So. When I returned from the US two weeks ago, it seemed that I took a little nasty passenger called a chest infection and I’ve only just recovered. I promised to post some pictures, so here is the first lot. I have no idea how many there will be. First…
When people decide to put their books on more than one retailer, they invariably face the question: should I go direct to other retailers or use one aggregator who does the distribution for all the books? There are some very good aggregators like Smashwords and Draft2Digital. They make life very…
There are many things you can do with short stories. They don’t take as long to write as novels and you can try out a lot of different worlds and styles. They can be pilots for books you plan to write or expansions or delving into backstory of characters of…
On most retail platforms, self published writers now have the opportunity to use pre-orders. Should you do this? There are some people in the industry who are very much in favour of pre-orders. There is a Smashwords survey that says that authors who use pre-orders sell better than those who…
We all know that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, except people do this all the time. People judge books by the cover when they see other people carrying those books on the train, they make judgements about what sort of people they are. This is of course…
In the days of what seems like instant success, viral posts and overnight careers, a lot of people seem to forget that for someone to have a decent amount of success takes time. When a writer or a blogger or a singer or anyone creative puts out a product which…
The mention of the word marketing gives a lot of writers hives. I think this is mostly because they misunderstand what is meant by marketing. They think that marketing means shouting buy my book on Facebook and Twitter. They think that marketing means sleazy tactics and mentioning your own book…
In the three year plan that is the foundation of my self-publishing books, I mentioned the example of writing 1000 words per day to achieve a publishing speed of four novels year. But this is assuming that you write relatively clean fiction. How many words do you really need to…
